1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to Web proxy services. More specifically, the invention relates to an advanced Web proxy service capable of modifying incoming and outgoing Web transactions.
2. Related Art
Various Web proxy services are currently available commercially. Examples include WebCleaner, Winproxy6, Webwasher, Portlet Bridge, and Squid Proxy. Webcleaner is a “C”-based, open source filtering HTTP proxy-HTML parser and filter. Winproxy6 is an Internet security proxy that provides anti-spyware protection, a firewall, antivirus protection, and Web filtering. Webwasher is a secure content management suite proxy that offers security solutions for individual threats (for example, worms and viruses in spam emails, malware on active Web pages, spyware, and ransom-ware), and that is hardware or software based. PortletBridge is a Web clipping proxy portlet for deployment within a Web portal. It is used to rewrite content from a downstream Website. The PortletBridge portlet makes downstream HTTP calls and uses CyberNeko and XSLT to do the Web clipping. It must operate in a portal environment and cannot be deployed remotely. Squid Proxy is an open source Web proxy cache server software used to proxy and cache HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and other URLs.
Although the commercially-available Web proxy services provide a variety of features, none of the above-described Web proxy services employ an XML-based rules and scenario scripting language, which would enable building and activating rules in real time. They also do not enable operator role and user, privilege-based rule visibility selection or provide a broad range of configurable scenario and/or rule-based activities, full bi-direction content filtering and/or blocking, full bi-directional content insertion, native bi-directional content routing and/or redirecting, full bi-directional content modification, or replacement and rule-based substitution of multiple types of Internet objects.
Network Web applications tend to be complicated and do not easily fit into a Web portal environment. None of the commercially-available Web proxy services is capable of executing content modification so as to enable complicated network Web applications to work through the portal.
The URLs that are contained in proxied pages must be encoded or “wrapped.” All references (anchor tags, images, JavaScript code references, etc.) need to be modified, so that when the client requests the specific content, the reference is translated on the proxy server and the actual path is resolved. For traditional proxies, the reference on the proxy server is supported as part of the protocol specification. Other solutions have utilized JavaScript to dynamically rewrite a page on the client side. Alternatively, the information is embedded in the QUERY_STRING (the part of a URL that contains data to be passed to CGI programs) or passed in cookies that contain the host and port for the content. All of these solutions have significant limitations in accomplishing the desired function (hiding/retrieving/modifying HTTP responses without modifying the browser configuration).
It is to the solution of these and other problems that the present invention is directed.